Ed Gandia explains why good prospects disappear after promising conversations and how to fix your discovery calls to keep them engaged. The key is better qualification: asking the right questions upfront so you're not chasing people who were never serious.
Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia.
Hey there. Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast. I am your host, Ed Gandia, and this is the podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to earn more and less time doing work they love or better Client. This episode is a little different and much shorter than usual rather than my typical 45 minute format. Today I'm sharing a quick tip with you and this is part of the regular audio insights that I publish for my private coaching clients. I just thought you'd find it helpful. So here we go. I hope you enjoy it.
Here's a frustrating situation you've no doubt experienced sometime, in fact, probably many times before. You have a great conversation with a prospect. They want to move forward with you. Every indication is that they want to work with you. You're excited about this and you send over your fee agreement for signature and deposit. And then the prospect ghosts you. You follow up like crazy and nothing. And you follow up like crazy because they've given you verbal confirmation that they want to proceed. Why does this happen and how can you keep this from happening? Can you keep this from happening? So here's the thing. You're not going to be able to completely eliminate these situations, but you can dramatically minimize them by practicing and refining your qualification process during your discovery call with the prospect. And just as a reminder, the discovery call is simply that initial conversation where you have with the prospect, where you get to ask questions of them to learn about their situation, what they're looking for, and how they're going about this. And one of the things that I see is that a lot of freelancers, even when they follow the process that I teach, they tend to improvise and they skip steps. And even though that's something that's kind of a natural thing, as you get really, really comfortable with this, you'll make it your own. It's very important that until you have this down, you go through every single step. It's okay to maybe move a couple of them around. They're actually in the order in which you should go through the process. And until you feel extremely comfortable, you should pretty much follow it to a T. And once you get really good at it, then you can go ahead and start improvising. So don't skip steps and trust your gut when you get responses. Okay? So that's the first thing. Second, pay particular attention to questions and answers about their pain or their challenge and the impact this is having on the business or in their marketing efforts. Okay, so kind of read between the lines and ask yourself, does this seem like this is really a big issue for them? Does it seem like this is something they're very motivated on fixing? Also pay particular attention to their timing for getting this done, when do they need it done? Does it seem like an urgent or important or maybe kind of a nice thing to get done? And then ask questions about their decision making criteria. How are they going about this?
